Mats Persson is Director of Open Europe, a think-tank with offices in London and Brussels, and an advisory board member of Open Europe Berlin.

EU immigration is as much of a challenge to Labour as it is to the Tories

Migration from EU countries will affect Labour as well as the Conservatives. (Photo: Alamy)

For obvious reasons, both UK and European media are zooming in on the Tories over EU migration. They risk missing a hugely important part of the story: Labour.

There tend to be three – perceived or real – broad concerns about EU migration: benefit abuse, bringing down wages and “British jobs for British workers.” The three they really should be treated separately – for legal, political and philosophical reasons.

EU rules on access to benefits are hugely complex with all sorts of tensions arising at the intersection of the EU single market and domestic social security systems. Still, this area is governed by EU regulations/directives and ECJ case law, which have extended free movement of workers to citizenship rights. There’s a huge discussion to be had about this, but put simply, if your primary concern is fair EU rules on access to benefits, take heart in that changing these rules – ending child benefits sent abroad and a moratorium on benefits for example – don’t involve EU treaty change.

Free movement of workers is a completely different story. Politically and philosophically, it involves the freedom or liberty to work anywhere in the EU. Legally, it’s fundamental to the EU treaties. An outright cap on workers from existing EU countries or measures to prioritise local workers over EU ones would involve a major EU treaty change and re-definition of the single market.

This distinction has several implications for the Tory and Labour positions on EU migration.

Though there's a lot of overlap, it’s natural that the Tories primarily are concerned with access to benefits whereas Labour worry more about cheap foreign labour and downward pressure on wages – it’s consistent with their respective belief-systems. Despite a raft of confused media stories, Cameron has never called for a cap on EU migrants or “limits” on free movement – though his communication on this has been pretty appalling so you can forgive the confusion. Instead, his actual proposed measures involve toughening access to benefits and beefed-up transitional controls for future EU accession states (next in line is Serbia – in a decade or so in a best-case scenario).

Various Labour figures on the other hand have suggested several ways to temper – or outright restrict – free movement of workers, to make sure Brits get the jobs and wages aren't pressed down, with shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna suggesting a "no job offer, no UK entry" rule, and Chris Bryant wanting a counter-measure making sure wages aren't pushed down. However, whenever it tries to address the fundamental issue – “British jobs, for British workers”, it gets stuck, because this is simply impossible under EU law. For a party whose primary source of funding is unions, this remains a big problem.

This tension is haunting centre-Left parties across Europe. In France, for example, anti-free movement sentiments are currently expressed through criticism of the ability of so-called “posted workers” from eastern and central Europe to, so the argument goes, undercut French workers. If anti-incumbency parties – more or less anti-immigration – like Front National, Finns Party, Danish People’s Party and the Sweden Democrats belong to some sort of "European tea party", it definitely comes with a social democrat flavour. Though playing the identity politics of the Right, these parties tend to be redistributive, protectionist and anti-foreign competition – therefore fishing in social democrat/union waters.

Ukip, of course, will be called on this sooner or later – is it centre-Right libertarian/liberal or centre-Left protectionist?

The good news for Labour is that the debate so far in the UK has primarily focussed on benefits, reflecting what I think is the basic British instinct: EU migrants coming to the UK to work hard and contribute are fine (polling would support this as well). This is also good news for those of us who believe free movement is on the whole beneficial to the UK and Europe.